William Hastie, a Glasgow professor of divinity, renders Rumi’s mystical gazels into English following Friedrich Rückert’s celebrated German versions, keeping the repeated rhymes of the original form. Poems on light, death and life, invocation and divine love are preceded by a long introduction on Jeláleddín as a Persian poet and a pointed criticism of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.
For readers of Sufi poetry, and for anyone curious about the Victorian quarrels over how to translate Persian verse. Download the free EPUB.